Tools and Equipment, What We Find In Books, What's In The Lab

Box Girls on Boxing Day

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Keeping a large circulating collection in usable shape means you are often so busy fixing or boxing books to get them back on the shelf that you don’t have time to look at the contents. When a first edition of Mary Van Kleeck’s Women in the Bookbinding Trade came into the lab, however, we all stopped to take a look.

Two photographs of bindery workers. "Box girls" in the upper photo, case makers in the lower photograph

This book, originally published in 1913, is a fascinating look into the working conditions for women in the binding trade around the turn of the century. Margaret Olivia Sage had used the considerable wealth amassed by her late husband to form the Russell Sage Foundation in 1907 for “the improvement of social and living conditions in the United States”, specifically by using scientific research to advocate for progressive reforms. The foundation funded a series of studies which documented the condition of women’s work in important trades in New York City. The 1900 US census reported that over a quarter of women bindery workers were employed in the city, so the location offered a sizable sample to extrapolate conditions across the United States.

Table and bar graph depicting the number of persons engaged in bookbinding in the united states by decade.

The turn of the century was an important period of transition for the binding trade. Work that was traditionally done completely by hand had become more mechanized in the late 19th century, and the number of women working in the trade was growing rapidly.  Binderies were typically gender-segregated, with women relegated to less skilled and lower wage work, like folding, gathering, and sewing textblocks and endbands. In most cases, all of the forwarding, covering, and finishing work was done by men. Van Kleeck’s book includes a lot of photographs, which offer a look at the conditions of the workspaces, the roles assigned to each gender, and the shift from fully manual to machine-assisted labor during this time.

Van Kleek notes that the introduction of more capable binding machines displaced a lot of workers in the book trade, shifting them to lower wage work or out of a job entirely. The author describes the case of one woman who learned to operate a folding machine, allowing her to double her weekly wages to $9.00. Within a few years a newer machine arrived that made multiple machine operators obsolete. She was transferred to hand folding, which was harder physical labor and only paid 4 cents per 100 sheets. Working as quickly as possible she could only earn $7.00 per week (p. 51).

As a side note, this page caught my eye when I realized that the heads of the people in the bottom photo had just been drawn in. I’m not entirely sure why – maybe they were a bit blurry because the camera exposure was long and they were moving quickly? Was it to anonymize the workers, or to make them look more the part?

20th century photoshop

It is so interesting to see photographs some of these machines in action. The technology was advancing pretty rapidly in this period and most of these models no longer exist. Some versions can be seen at the American Bookbinders Museum in San Francisco.

In the finishing department, women were often only found laying gold leaf onto covers, rather than operating stamping machines or gilding the edges of textblocks.

The introduction of electric lights in the late 19th century allowed businesses to operate at all hours. Without labor protections (and a supreme court actively hostile to organized labor), many factory workers were forced to work long hours. Van Kleek notes that binderies are legally classified as factories, and despite state laws barring any woman over the age of 16 from working more than 60 hours, workers regularly reported 14 hour shifts, 6 days a week. The book describes workers commuting to and from dangerous neighborhoods in the early hours of the morning. As a result, young women regularly went missing. The study also records rampant child labor violations in the book trade.

I think we can all relate to “artificial light all day”

By examining the details of Mary Van Kleek‘s work, one can follow a line directly from this book to the establishment of the modern work week and labor protections we enjoy today. Van Kleek began working for the Sage Foundation shortly after its founding as the secretary of the Committee on Women’s Work. There she was mentored and trained by prominent labor activists like Florence Kelley and Lilian Brandt. Her research for this publication and others like Artificial Flower Makers (1913) and Wages in the Millinery Trade (1914) was  instrumental in the passage of New York state labor laws limiting working hours in 1910 and 1915. During WWI, Van Kleek was appointed by Woodrow Wilson to lead the new Women in Industry Service group in the Department of Labor. That group published a report that became the basis for the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established the eight-hour workday, five-day workweek, a federal minimum wage, overtime pay, and prohibited child labor.

Conservation, What We Find In Books, What's In The Lab

An Adorable Fire Hazard

We’ve written before (many times) about the unusual and sometimes problematic objects that we find in books. Scrapbooks tend to be the worst offenders for this situation. In most cases, the inserted object is either damaging the pages around it or too bulky and deforming the book. In the case of this scrapbook from the Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans family papers, though, the problem item poses a danger to the collections around the scrapbook, too.

Several of the scrapbook pages have paper matchbooks mounted to them. Much like the ticket stubs that appear alongside, the printed matchbook is a keepsake to remember a special occasion. These matches come from a Longchamps restaurant, where Mary dined before attending a show. The exterior of this matchbook is a metallic gold, but the real design highlight appears inside.

The matches are shaped and printed to look like rows of little chefs!

This scrapbook dates from the 1930s, so these are probably “safety matches” – meaning they cannot ignite without the contacting the striking strip on the cover of the matchbook. They are also quite old at this point, and may not even light using the strip. There is still a risk to the collection, however, so Rachel Penniman did some research to determine the best way to make them safe before rehousing the scrapbook.

There are a couple of options for dealing with matches in a collection. The quickest solution is to physically remove the matches. In another example from the same scrapbook (pictured above), the bottom of the matchbook and all the individual matches were torn off before mounting. If all of the matchbooks were treated this way, then we wouldn’t have to worry, but a lot of information would be lost.

One of the individual matches (already used) is also taped to this page, so we can see that Longchamps used more than one chef design in their matchbooks.

Clipping off just the match head could also be a good solution for removing the potential for ignition while retaining more of the original material. If the matches in these books were more of a plain design, that could be a viable option here, but we just couldn’t bring ourselves to decapitate the little chefs. Luckily, there was another way.

Our colleagues at Northwestern University have developed a method for coating the match heads to prevent lighting. To treat the match heads, Rachel applied three coatings of a matte acrylic medium: one dilute layer to penetrate and then two coatings of undiluted acrylic to form a protective layer. After the coating had cured, the scrapbook was ready to be boxed and returned to the stacks. The acrylic medium is not tacky when dry, so it will not stick to the matchbook cover or facing scrapbook pages when the book is closed.

One of the major challenges of caring for a large research collection is the wide variety of objects and materials that are contained within it. When confronted with potentially harmful items like these matchbooks, it is so helpful to read about how other conservators have dealt with them.

What's In The Lab

Some Boxes Are Just Too Fancy

One of the first lines of defense for a damaged book is a well-fitting enclosure. It can prevent loss of any loose pieces or additional strain on weaker binding materials from handling during shelving.  Many of the books in special collections were boxed long ago or before their acquisition. When those items come into the lab for treatment, we evaluate the box for fit, function, and artifactual value to determine if it should be retained or replaced.

Lately I’ve been working on a 1545 edition of The  Byrth of Mankynde from the Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine collection. Originally published in 1540, this book is the oldest manual for midwifery printed in English. It contains several copper plate engravings of anatomy – apparently some of the first in England to be produced by roller press. My favorites are the figures of fetuses in utero, which look more like babies floating in light bulbs or balloons.

The book had been boxed decades ago in a very nice quarter-leather slipcase, with a shaped spine and false raised bands to make it look like a binding when sitting on the shelf. The maroon goatskin has been tooled in gold to mark the title, author, and publication information on the spine and along the “boards” where the leather meets the red cloth.

Slipcases can be damaging to a book if they fit too tightly, often causing abrasion on the boards as the book slides in and out. This slipcase avoids those problems with a 4-flap enclosure, which can be removed with a red ribbon pull tab on the fore-edge. Unfortunately that ribbon has started to split and is barely hanging on at this point.

The inside of the 4-flap is covered with a red marbled paper that matches the colors of the other materials very well. It even includes small metallic flakes that sparkle a little as you open the box.

The interior of the slipcase is covered with the same marbled paper.

While these decorative papers really enhance the visual appeal of the box, they can present a number of problems for the book itself. Often the dyes or pigments used in colored papers can rub off onto a book through normal handling; if the binding material is lighter in color you might see some staining on the board edges.

The bigger risk from these colored materials, though, is if the box ever gets wet. Much like a red sock in a load of white laundry, water-soluble dyes can easily transfer to the pages of the book and cause staining that may be impossible to remove.  I worried that in a water event this box could turn all those little lightbulb babies bright pink.

An easy way to test for solubility is with a basic water drop test. Immediately after placing a very small drop of water onto the surface of the marbled paper, I used a piece of clean blotter to wick it up. Looking at the scrap of blotter, you can see if there was any discoloration or transfer of the solubilized media. You can repeat this process a couple of times with larger drops, left for a longer duration.

I could see some transfer of red to the blotter when the water was in contact with the marbled paper for only a few seconds. The same test on the cloth produced a far more dramatic result.

I appreciate the quality of craftsmanship that went into making this enclosure. A lot of effort was put into making a very deluxe box for this significant and valuable book. The leather is pared well and the titling is very clean. The maker clearly spent time selecting leather, cloth, and marbled paper that went together. Unfortunately all those fancy materials present too much of a risk to the book and will need to be replaced. While the cloth-covered boxes that we make are pretty visually plain, that’s actually one of their strengths. The lack of decoration or color is often the safer choice… and you don’t want your box to outshine the book anyway.

Circulating collections care, job announcement

Job Opening: Duke Libraries Senior Conservation Technician

Duke University Libraries is seeking applicants for Senior Conservation Technician in the Verne and Tanya Roberts Conservation Lab.  Come join our team!

As Senior Conservation Technician you will:

books in presses

  • Carry out basic, intermediate, and advanced repairs primarily on circulating collection materials.
  • Construct custom enclosures for library materials from circulating and special collections.
  • Prepare items for the shelf including binding pamphlets, inserting loose materials, making pockets, etc.
  • Retrieve and triage materials from circulation points across the library system.
  • Manage lab spaces and equipment.
  • Manage student assistants including assisting in the hiring, interviewing, training, and quality control of their work.
  • Contribute to outreach initiatives including writing for our blog.

The job announcement outlines further job responsibilities and the application requirements: https://library.duke.edu/about/jobs/srconservationtechnician

Applicants invited for an interview will be expected to present a portfolio of work.

You will succeed in this role with these skills and abilities:

  • Demonstrated knowledge of book repair techniques for 19th and 20th Century library materials, including books bound in cloth, leather, and paper.
  • Demonstrated knowledge of the construction of a variety of custom enclosures for library materials.
  • Capable of managing multiple projects and priorities simultaneously.
  • Detail oriented with good problem-solving skills.
  • Ability to work independently and as part of a team.
  • Ability to teach basic conservation skills to student assistants with little or no conservation experience.

Salary and Benefits

Salary dependent on qualifications and experience; anticipated salary range $50,000-$60,000. Comprehensive benefits package includes 15 days vacation, 14 holidays, 12 days sick leave;   health, dental, disability and life insurance and support for professional development and training.

About us:

The Duke University Libraries are the center of intellectual life at Duke, one of the most highly ranked private universities in the nation. The William R. Perkins Library, Bostock Library, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and von der Heyden Pavilion comprise the university’s main library complex, which is joined on East Campus by the Lilly and Music Libraries, and by the Pearse Memorial Library at the Duke Marine Lab. Together with the separately administered libraries serving the schools of Business, Divinity, Law, and Medicine, they comprise one of the country’s top 10 private research library systems. Consistently recognized as a great place to work, we strive to provide an inclusive, safe, and welcoming environment with equitable support for all people.

More information about the Duke Libraries and the Verne and Tanya Roberts Conservation Lab can be found here:

Where Curiosity Leads, the Duke University Libraries Strategic Plan, 2024-2029

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Duke University Libraries

Duke Libraries Conservation Services Department

Preservation Underground: Dispatches from the Duke University Libraries Preservation & Conservation Department

More about Duke and Durham:

Located halfway between the Great Smoky Mountains and the beaches of the Atlantic, Durham is home to hundreds of restaurants, more than 40 annual festivals, Duke and North Carolina Central universities, art and science museums, world-class medical facilities, and a rapidly growing, richly diverse population. One of three cities that make up North Carolina’s Research Triangle, Durham is known as a vibrant hub for innovation and technology, as well as an incubator of many successful start-ups. It is consistently ranked among the best places to live, do business, and retire. Learn more at https://durham.duke.edu/.

Duke University consistently ranks among the best employers in the country. Duke offers a comprehensive benefit packages which includes both traditional benefits such as health insurance, leave time and retirement, as well as wide ranging work/life and cultural benefits. Details can be found at:  http://www.hr.duke.edu/benefits/duke_benefits.html .

To learn more or to apply, please go to:  

https://library.duke.edu/about/jobs/srconservationtechnician

Quick Pic, What We Find In Books

Quick Pic: Remove If You Need To

General Collections conservation is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get from Circulation. Lucky for us, this gentle reader only got through a couple chapters, not the whole text. We’ll take this over highlighting or underlining any day.

Sticky note on book
We do need to, thanks.
Sticky note on book
The fading would indicate these have been here a while.
Book with a lot of sticky notes
Arrows on stickies: 21st Century manicules?
Conservation, Housing, Uncategorized, What's In The Lab

When Items Keep Getting Bigger

Some treatments require a lot of coordination with our colleagues over in special collections to ensure that that they have a good permanent home in the stacks.  We construct custom housing to meet the specific needs of the item for storage, but we also need to be sure that the enclosure we design will actually fit on a shelf and can moved from the stacks to the reading room. Sometimes the description and shelving location in the catalog also need to be updated if the item changes size during treatment.

This 17th century English indenture and deed is a recent example that left the lab much larger than it arrived. It came to us folded up in a relatively small package, measuring around 7″ square. It unfolded into a pretty large (20″ x 30″) manuscript legal document, written in ink on parchment with the remains of five parchment strips and wax seals along the bottom. The earliest text dates from 1620, with five individuals (Symon Courte, Edward Pyne, Thomas Alcastle, Humfree Quicke, and yeoman John Hare) granting property rights in West Monkton to two people (Baldwine Wallet and yeoman Richard God). Additional text on the back dated 57 years later grants further inheritance of property rights to Robert Alcastle (Thomas Alcastle’s grandson and executor of his father’s estate).

Before treatment, photographed in raking light to emphasize the folds.

The bottom edge of the parchment is folded over so that the five parchment strips can lace through two layers and be held securely in place. The parchment strips were twisted together and rough balls of red wax were affixed to stop the strips from being removed. Some of the signatories wrote their names across both the document’s folded lower edge and the visible square of the parchment strip as an authentication or security measure.

The document was folded both vertically and horizontally several times to make storage easier, but it made opening and reading the document quite a challenge. The parchment has a strong memory and will fold back onto itself without being weighted down. Yellowed adhesive residue from pressure sensitive tape was visible along the top edge – maybe used as a previous mounting solution. The wax seals had also became quite banged up over the years, so only one of the wax balls remained intact. The broken remains of another had been wrapped in a thin textile and tied onto the parchment strip with string. Little bits of red wax would sometimes fall out of the pouch when handled.

After treatment, photographed in raking light.

After dry cleaning the front and back of the parchment and removing as much of the tape residue as I could, I performed some minor flattening of the parchment sheet. My goal was to flatten it enough that the document would lay open on its own, while still retaining the evidence of how it was folded up for storage.  I didn’t want any more fragments of the broken wax seal to be lost, so I took the remains out of the textile pouch and wrapped them in a little pleated package of soft Japanese paper, adhered closed with wheat starch paste. This seamed like a better solution than sealing them in some kind of stable plastic, like polyethylene, since the paper doesn’t crinkle so loudly. I tucked the package back inside the textile wrapping and secured it closed with some small stitches thin linen thread, toned to match.

My goal for the enclosure design was to protect all the different parts of the document, and also to help hold it flat should there be any changes in relative humidity. Boxes for parchment covered books often use of a restraining flap, so I thought something similar could be employed here with a rigid portfolio.

I knew this enclosure would be stored flat on the shelf, but I still didn’t want the document to move around too much inside – to protect the surface from abrasion, but also so as not to risk further damage to the parchment strips and wax. I cut a sheet of paper just a bit bigger than the dimensions of the document, then affixed wide paper corners to hold it in place. This was mounted to a sheet of matboard, which also had a sheet of E-flute corrugated board laminated to the back. This makes the matboard stiffer without adding much weight. Soft twill tape was laced through the board around where the two remaining wax seals were hanging, so they could be tied down and would not bounce around inside the box when it is served to a patron in the reading room.

The portfolio top flap is also made of laminated sheets of matboard and blue corrugated, with a Tyvek tape hinge along the top edge that attaches it to the bottom board. All of the corners were rounded and the bottom edge of the top flap’s matboard was sanded to take off the hard edge.

The custom sized portfolio ended up being larger than any of our standard metal edge boxes, so I created a custom fit telescoping lid box out of corrugated to hold it. Unfortunately we also don’t stock corrugated sheets large enough – so I had to join two sheets together with tyvek tape to make either the base or the lid. A third piece of corrugated was glued to the outside of both the lid and the base to stop the tape join from flexing when the box was lifted or tilted. The enclosure got a photo label at the bottom corner to help with identifying it on the shelf.

Removing the document from this enclosure to examine both front and back is fairly easy. After untying the twill tape, the parchment can be gently lifted out from under two of the paper corners, and then you can fully slide the document out. It actually requires two people to flip it over, since it is so large. While making this enclosure, I made sure to check that it wasn’t too large for the bigger shelves in the stacks and that it could fit through a standard-width door while resting on a cart.

Disaster planning, May Day, Preservation Week

Preservation Week: What’s in Your Disaster Supply Closet?

I inventory our disaster supplies and make sure people know where to find them every year during Preservation Week and May Day. We have plenty of supplies and equipment in the main library where Conservation is located. A couple years ago we expanded our supplies to include branch libraries and our Collections Services building.

Tote bin with disaster supplies
Branch Library Disaster Tote

While there are many disaster supply lists available online (see below), we found that for our locations we needed customized supply totes. Our totes are stocked with the basics that are needed to respond to small incidents, or start a response while staff await the disaster team’s arrival. Here is a screenshot of our tote contents. I will probably tweak this list going forward, but these totes have proved useful already by all of our branches.

A pdf of a list of supplies in each disaster tote.
Disaster Supply Tote Contents

Our supply cabinet in Collections Services contains the same supplies, plus it has some handy tools and supplies for Conservation when we are on site doing some minor repairs.

Disaster supply cabinet at central campus location.
Supply cabinet in Collections Services
Online Kit Supply Suggestions

There are a lot of resources out there that will advise you on what In our experience we have found that every site has different needs for their disaster kits. These are great places to start your supply list. If you are in a small institution, these can be a quick and easy way to get some supplies in place, then you can add/subtract supplies later to make the kits your own.

AIC Collections Emergency Kits This presentation from 2021 has a variety of handouts.
Harvard Library Recommended Emergency Supplies An extensive list to get you started.
NEDCC Preservation 101 Disaster Supply Checklist A handy printable checklist.
University Products Disaster Recovery Kit An off-the-shelf option with some basic supplies.
Gaylord Be Ready Recovery Kit Another ready-made option.

What’s in your disaster supply kit?

Disaster planning, May Day, Preservation Week

May Day: Time to Update Your Disaster Plan

It’s May Day, the annual celebration that reminds you to spend a few minutes to make sure your cultural heritage organization is ready when a disaster hits. Be it small or large, any kind of emergency in your institution needs a plan.

Do one thing today to make sure you are ready. That can be making sure the phone numbers and URL’s in your plan are updated; you can look at your disaster kit and make sure your have plenty of supplies on hand; or make sure everyone in your organization knows where they can find a copy of the plan.

Disaster Plan Templates

A 2014 follow up survey by IMLS indicated that only 42% of collecting institutions had a disaster plan. While that was almost double from the initial Heritage Health Survey in 2004, that is still an alarming number. It may take more than 15 minutes to write a plan. There are many templates out there, and once you have that draft the subsequent updates are easy.

The Pocket Response Plan (TM) PREP (TM) templates are one of the easiest plans to adopt. These are customizable templates. We have a phone tree on one side, and we wrote First Steps for staff who will be first on the scene.  This plan folds down into a credit card-sized plan that can fit into a small envelope or your wallet. Handy especially when cell phone towers are out due to storms.

The Field Guide to Emergency Response is a handy spiral-bound book that can walk you through creating a disaster plan. This is a great option for smaller organizations, or for people who like a portable paper option for your plan.

Page from Field Guide with list of contacts
Field Guide to Emergency Response

The Risk Evaluation and Planning Program (REPP) is a series of self-study tools. Originally developed by Heritage Preservation with support from an IMLS grant, the project helps you identify your institution’s risks, helps you prioritize risks, and provides many checklists and worksheets. It requires some time to go through the entire set of worksheets, but you will know a lot about your building and risk factors at the end.

Duke University Libraries Preservation